Apple Changes Limits to Photo Stream Uploading

Apple has made changes to its upload and sharing limitations with My Photo Stream. The limitations are based on the number of photos that you can upload and share per hour, day or month. For instance, Apple has made it so that you can only upload 1,000 photos per hour, and only share 1,000 photos per hour as well.

Since My Photo Stream doesn’t count towards iCloud storage, you can upload as many photos as you want through My Photo Stream without your iCloud storage going up, but apparently Apple thinks this has led to some abuse with the bandwidth. The company isn’t limiting all-time uploads to My Photo Stream, but it is limiting day-to-day upload counts.

Apple says that exceeding these limits will result in your uploads being “paused temporarily and you may see a notification message on your device.” After the hour, day or month has passed, you’ll get your upload abilities back in full force. Users will be given a limit of 1,000 photo uploads per hour, 10,000 photos per day and 25,000 photos per month.

As for sharing photos, users are also given limits of sharing 1,000 photos per hour and 10,000 photos per day, with no monthly limit. Our only guess is that Apple is implementing these limits to save on bandwidth so that its servers don’t overload and crash at some point.

Again, there’s no limit to the amount of photos you can upload to My Photo Stream in the long term, and My Photo Stream does not counted against users’ iCloud Storage; photos uploaded to My Photo Stream are stored in iCloud for 30 days to give iOS devices plenty of time to connect to iCloud and download them.

If you’re not familiar with My Photo Stream, it’s Apple’s own photo-sharing service that allows you to easily send photos you take on your iPhone or iPad directly to your Mac wirelessly over the internet using iCloud. It’s similar to Dropbox’s or Google+ instant upload feature, but simply through Apple’s own ecosystem, which some iOS users find easier to use in the long run. While these limitations aren’t as good as unlimited freedom, we doubt a lot of Photo Stream users will meet these limitations.